#butwhowascolleague
The New Yorker had a profile of "Obama's Lost Year", which was OH-SO-CONVENIENTLY-FOR-US framed around Virginia's Fifth District. Awesome, right? EXCEPT THE ARTICLE'S NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE. (suicide, etc.) But never fear. Just in case you guys didn't buy the magazine already for the Geithner profile, I am going to transcribe the Tom-Tom parts for reference. Here's an old picture of him being a fierce bitch to draw you in.
Starting off with the physical description:
In spite of his charcoal suit and flag lapel pin, Perriello - who spoke not long after Virginia's outgoing governor, Tim Kaine - didn't look like a politician. Short and broad-shouldered, with a wide face and a muscular jawline, he more closely resembled a college wrestler. He made no effort to schmooze: his mode is to heighten the awkwardness of mingling with strangers by saying little at first, then calling attention to the pauses. What I took for youthful unease - Perriello is thirty-five - turned out to be an almost angry restlessness, which found its outlet when he began his speech. The energy in the museum hall suddenly picked up.
And now a bit about young!Tom. unf, despite the DMB:
Perriello, the unmarried son of a Charlottesville pediatrician, is a graduate of Yale and Yale Law. Nobody in the district really understood what he did for a living before he was elected to Congress. If you asked Perriello about it, he'd answer, "How long do you have?," hen describe himself as a "national-security consultant", a "social-justice activist", and a "public entrepreneur". He spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he advised the tribunal that was prosecuting war crimes. He had helped tart a progressive religious organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Internet advocacy groups, such as DarfurGenocide.org. He listened to the Dave Matthews Band and "conscious hip-hop" in his truck, a white Ford pickup. When he raised a glass of Jack Daniel's, it was to toast "a better world". He once wore a beard and briefly lived in New York, which had provided material for an ad by his opponent in 2008. He was told by political consultants not to mention his work in West Africa. His election victory was considered miraculous.
Okay, now all of it put together! Under the cut, cause it'll get long. FYI, I'm transcribing this not just cause of fangirlling but beacuse it's a really good article, although I'm not doing the whole thing because it would be HUGE. But Perriello is sooo right throughout this whole thing. Which is why there's no bolding. Muahahaha.
In the middle of January this year, during a week when three furniture factories around Martinsville announced layoffs amounting to two hundred jobs, Tom Perriello, the freshman Democrat who represents the Fifth District, visited the town. That week, the idea of a Democratic realignment was vanishing: Scott Brown, a Republican, was about to pull off an upset in the Massachusetts Senate race. The Obama Administration's agenda, above all health-care reform, was stalled in Congress. Perriello, who had defeated a longtime Republican incumbent in 2008 by fewer than a thousand votes, was at the top of the list of endangered Democrats in the fall election. Last summer, he had held twenty-one town-hall meetings around the district - more than any other congressman - and listened, for five or six hours at a time, to constituents complaints about the Administration's health-care plan. Tea Party activists had gathered in the parking lot outside his office in Charlottesville and staged protests against the cap-and-trade bill - energy legislation that Perriello had supported. Insurance companies and Republican groups had begun airing attack ads about him two weeks after he started his job. Eight Republican candidates were now gunning for his seat.
So it was with more than a little urgency that Perriello wanted to publicize the distribution of ten million dollars in grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus package. When he took office, he had sent one of his aides, Ridge Schuyler, on a tour of the district to identify promising projects that could use help. Around the hill and farms and small towns of the Southside, the depressed region that includes Martinsville, Schuyler found dozens of nascent projects in renewable energy, all initiated by local farmers and entrepreneurs. Perriello believed that an economic revival in his district would come five or ten jobs at a time - the big factories were gone forever - and that many of the jobs would be green. he needed to prove that this idea was not a fantasy, and to overcome his constituents' skepticism. So Perriello helped secure a million dollars in stimulus funds for Martinsville's landfill to convert methane gas into electricity; and million dollars for a dairy farm to set up an anaerobic digester, which recovers methane from manure; three-quarters of a million dollars for a local truck stop to generate electricity out of glycerin waste from its biodiesel refinery.
The ceremony to announce the grants took place in the main hall of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, with local media and a group of high-school students in attendance, under the suspended skeleton of a fourteen-million-year-old whale. In spite of his charcoal suit and flag lapel pin, Perriello - who spoke not long after Virginia's outgoing governor, Tim Kaine - didn't look like a politician. Short and broad-shouldered, with a wide face and a muscular jawline, he more closely resembled a college wrestler. He made no effort to schmooze: his mode is to heighten the awkwardness of mingling with strangers by saying little at first, then calling attention to the pauses. What I took for youthful unease - Perriello is thirty-five - turned out to be an almost angry restlessness, which found its outlet when he began his speech. The energy in the museum hall suddenly picked up.
"The next big thing this area can be known for is clean energy," Perriello said, in a voice with no trace of a put-on twang. He saluted the owners of Red Birch, the biodiesel truck stop, calling them "freedom fighters and adding, "Instead of driving by their truck stop and leaving three or four cents on a dollar spent, you leave ninety cents at theirs. When things are 'too big to fail', maybe they're a little too big to be the model in the first place. We are right on the cusp of a transformation, and that's why it's so exciting. This is a kind of industrial-revolution moment." He blamed both parties for policies that favored big corporations and made America's small producers less competitive. "I'm sick of it," Perriello declared. "I'm sick of buying everything from China and overseas, and sending our dollars to petro-dictators!" His voice rose. "Politicians from both parties have never been to a farm - only for a photo op. They think it's the jobs of the past. But I'm here to tell you that they're the jobs of the future."
Afterward, I drove with Perriello to Charlottesville for a meeting with local health-care groups. Perriello, the unmarried son of a Charlottesville pediatrician, is a graduate of Yale and Yale Law. Nobody in the district really understood what he did for a living before he was elected to Congress. If you asked Perriello about it, he'd answer, "How long do you have?," hen describe himself as a "national-security consultant", a "social-justice activist", and a "pblic entrepreneur". He spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he advised the tribunal that was prosecuting war crimes. He had helped tart a progressive religious organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Internet advocacy groups, such as DarfurGenocide.org. He listened to the Dave Matthews Band and "conscious hip-hop" in his truck, a white Ford pickup. When he raised a glass of Jack Daniel's, it was to toast "a better world". He once wore a beard and briefly lived in New York, which had provided material for an ad by his opponent in 2008. He was told by political consultants not to mention his work in West Africa. His election victory was considered miraculous.
Perriello is an emblematic member of the Obama generation - a practical-minded idealist, skeptical of Washington but also eager to make government work on behalf of the hard-pressed farmer, the out of work seamstress, the small businessman. Obama was the first politician in Perriello's lifetime whho had inspired him. But as we drove along the highway he expressed frustration over the Administration's first year in office. Perriello bemoaned the Democrats' failure to explain the recovery act to the American People. "I've ever been part of any organization that was so bad at talking about its accomplishments," he said. He gave himself a decent chance of getting reelected, but at the moment he had a different concern: the Obama Administration was too cautious, and too close to Wall Street. He was thinking about writing an op-ed calling for the firing of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary. Perriello had won in 2008 by talking about "corporate capture of government", and by convincing voters that the Democrats would take on the big banks and corporations whose collusion with Washington had made it impossible for small entrepreneurs in the Fifth District to compete. Some of Obama's actions were undercutting Perriello's case.
As I drove, he checked his Blackberry and read an e-mail from a colleague. At that moment, a meeting was taking place ain the White House between the President and members of the Democratic caucus, and Obama had given a shout-out to Perriello - thanking him for his courageous votes, affirming their friendship, and promising to campaign for him int he Fifth District. For a moment, Perriello looked happy.
Blah blah blah... stimulus talk. Brief mention:A year ago, amid a mood of rising desperation, the public might well have embraced a large public-works program. Tom Perriello had been among the congressmen supporting it.
Infrastructure, etc...Over dinner on a recent snowy night in Washington, Tom Perriello said, "We should have gone in and done the kind of stimulus that would actually turn the economy around. We ended up with something that was strong enough to prevent a depression. But it just wasn't strong enough to stimulate the recovery." Perriello faulted teh administration not just for the size and composition of the stimulus package but for its lack of imagination. "It's very hard for people to understand, if all we see is the same thing we had last year, that without the stimulus we wouldn't even have held our ground," he said. "That's why we needed something more visionary. There was not a game-changer in the bill." As an example, Perriello mentioned the idea of building a national "smart grid" - a decentralized system of distributing power - whose creation would spur small-scal innovation acrsos the country. Such an ambitious project, Perriello argued, would have immediately signalled to investors where the money should flow. The Recovery Act allocated four billion dollars for smart-grid technology, but Perriello called the amount woefully inadequate. He compared teh days after OBama's Inauguration to the period following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the public was ready to be called on to think and act anew. "You could have done anything," Perriello said.
And on why another spending bill won't work: "The elites in the media and the Senate are already out of the depression," Perriello said.
On Obama-ian psychology:Tom Perriello, who admitted to sitting in "relatively cheap seats", remarked that the surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it's the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.
On bipartisanship:And, within weeks after Tom Perriello took office, freshman Republicans in the House had already stopped returning his phone calls, presumably on instructions from their leadership.
On why Republicans hate bipartisanship:Tom Perriello, typically, was even more blunt. He described conservative intransigence, in the face of critical national problems that were the legacy of Republican rule, as "unprecedented soullessness."
On #AIGFail:According to Perriello and other Democrats, a turning point came in March, 2009, when news broke that American International Group, int eh insurance giant that had received billions of dollars in bailout money, would pay its employees a hundred and sixty-five million dollars in bonuses.
...
As Perriello saw it, the Administration's failure to ttack AIG bonuses was more than a tactical error. It was a moment when Obama's economic policy was not actually based on responsibility. Ignoring the furor over the bonuses, Perriello said, revealed that Obama's economic team - especially Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who rums the National Economic Council - were far too close to the financial sector and had little empathy for middle-class Americans. "If you only know other people on Wall Street who make six or seven figures, all you're trying to do is get back to the nineties," Perriello said. "Well, in the nineties people in my district were losing a crapload of jobs." For Perriello, gong after Wall Street was not just a matter of conviction; it was the politics of survival, allowing him to draw a sharp line between the interests of the working people of his district and the interests of the Republicans they usually elected. But he wasn't getting help from the administration.
A few pages of talk about the Administration, a few pages about guys who make biofuel, then: He and his partners considered Perriello their champion. The Congressman gave them a bit of hope. Price said of Perriello, "Of all the people you meet in politics, he is the most down-to-earth, feel-like-he's-listening to kind of guy."
Perriello is currently pushing for a bill - he calls his version the Every Penny to Main Street Act - that would direct the money that banks have paid back from the bailout toward creating new jobs in time for the summer construction season. When I asked him if the idea would have the Administration's support, he said, "It's hard even now to understand what the White House's economic theory is." But Perriello hasn't given up on the President. He praised Obama's willingness to continue pushing for reforms in energy and health care, despite their current unpopularity. "We continue to see in this President and this Administration an unbelievable willingness to do what I got into politics to do, which is to take on the problems that neither part has had the guts to touch for my entire life," he said. "people will respect the courage to step up and solve these problems, as long as they see it as new policies - 'We are going to stand up to the special interests' - and not old politics: 'How are we going to carve out enough for every group?' The thing that gives me hope right now is that the President has got the message that this is a 'Let Obama be Obama' moment, that he should rise or fall on who he really is." Perriello added, "The downside is, I don't think we know yet who he really is."
The end. (Apologies for the typos that no doubt escaped me.)
Starting off with the physical description:
In spite of his charcoal suit and flag lapel pin, Perriello - who spoke not long after Virginia's outgoing governor, Tim Kaine - didn't look like a politician. Short and broad-shouldered, with a wide face and a muscular jawline, he more closely resembled a college wrestler. He made no effort to schmooze: his mode is to heighten the awkwardness of mingling with strangers by saying little at first, then calling attention to the pauses. What I took for youthful unease - Perriello is thirty-five - turned out to be an almost angry restlessness, which found its outlet when he began his speech. The energy in the museum hall suddenly picked up.
And now a bit about young!Tom. unf, despite the DMB:
Perriello, the unmarried son of a Charlottesville pediatrician, is a graduate of Yale and Yale Law. Nobody in the district really understood what he did for a living before he was elected to Congress. If you asked Perriello about it, he'd answer, "How long do you have?," hen describe himself as a "national-security consultant", a "social-justice activist", and a "public entrepreneur". He spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he advised the tribunal that was prosecuting war crimes. He had helped tart a progressive religious organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Internet advocacy groups, such as DarfurGenocide.org. He listened to the Dave Matthews Band and "conscious hip-hop" in his truck, a white Ford pickup. When he raised a glass of Jack Daniel's, it was to toast "a better world". He once wore a beard and briefly lived in New York, which had provided material for an ad by his opponent in 2008. He was told by political consultants not to mention his work in West Africa. His election victory was considered miraculous.
Okay, now all of it put together! Under the cut, cause it'll get long. FYI, I'm transcribing this not just cause of fangirlling but beacuse it's a really good article, although I'm not doing the whole thing because it would be HUGE. But Perriello is sooo right throughout this whole thing. Which is why there's no bolding. Muahahaha.
In the middle of January this year, during a week when three furniture factories around Martinsville announced layoffs amounting to two hundred jobs, Tom Perriello, the freshman Democrat who represents the Fifth District, visited the town. That week, the idea of a Democratic realignment was vanishing: Scott Brown, a Republican, was about to pull off an upset in the Massachusetts Senate race. The Obama Administration's agenda, above all health-care reform, was stalled in Congress. Perriello, who had defeated a longtime Republican incumbent in 2008 by fewer than a thousand votes, was at the top of the list of endangered Democrats in the fall election. Last summer, he had held twenty-one town-hall meetings around the district - more than any other congressman - and listened, for five or six hours at a time, to constituents complaints about the Administration's health-care plan. Tea Party activists had gathered in the parking lot outside his office in Charlottesville and staged protests against the cap-and-trade bill - energy legislation that Perriello had supported. Insurance companies and Republican groups had begun airing attack ads about him two weeks after he started his job. Eight Republican candidates were now gunning for his seat.
So it was with more than a little urgency that Perriello wanted to publicize the distribution of ten million dollars in grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus package. When he took office, he had sent one of his aides, Ridge Schuyler, on a tour of the district to identify promising projects that could use help. Around the hill and farms and small towns of the Southside, the depressed region that includes Martinsville, Schuyler found dozens of nascent projects in renewable energy, all initiated by local farmers and entrepreneurs. Perriello believed that an economic revival in his district would come five or ten jobs at a time - the big factories were gone forever - and that many of the jobs would be green. he needed to prove that this idea was not a fantasy, and to overcome his constituents' skepticism. So Perriello helped secure a million dollars in stimulus funds for Martinsville's landfill to convert methane gas into electricity; and million dollars for a dairy farm to set up an anaerobic digester, which recovers methane from manure; three-quarters of a million dollars for a local truck stop to generate electricity out of glycerin waste from its biodiesel refinery.
The ceremony to announce the grants took place in the main hall of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, with local media and a group of high-school students in attendance, under the suspended skeleton of a fourteen-million-year-old whale. In spite of his charcoal suit and flag lapel pin, Perriello - who spoke not long after Virginia's outgoing governor, Tim Kaine - didn't look like a politician. Short and broad-shouldered, with a wide face and a muscular jawline, he more closely resembled a college wrestler. He made no effort to schmooze: his mode is to heighten the awkwardness of mingling with strangers by saying little at first, then calling attention to the pauses. What I took for youthful unease - Perriello is thirty-five - turned out to be an almost angry restlessness, which found its outlet when he began his speech. The energy in the museum hall suddenly picked up.
"The next big thing this area can be known for is clean energy," Perriello said, in a voice with no trace of a put-on twang. He saluted the owners of Red Birch, the biodiesel truck stop, calling them "freedom fighters and adding, "Instead of driving by their truck stop and leaving three or four cents on a dollar spent, you leave ninety cents at theirs. When things are 'too big to fail', maybe they're a little too big to be the model in the first place. We are right on the cusp of a transformation, and that's why it's so exciting. This is a kind of industrial-revolution moment." He blamed both parties for policies that favored big corporations and made America's small producers less competitive. "I'm sick of it," Perriello declared. "I'm sick of buying everything from China and overseas, and sending our dollars to petro-dictators!" His voice rose. "Politicians from both parties have never been to a farm - only for a photo op. They think it's the jobs of the past. But I'm here to tell you that they're the jobs of the future."
Afterward, I drove with Perriello to Charlottesville for a meeting with local health-care groups. Perriello, the unmarried son of a Charlottesville pediatrician, is a graduate of Yale and Yale Law. Nobody in the district really understood what he did for a living before he was elected to Congress. If you asked Perriello about it, he'd answer, "How long do you have?," hen describe himself as a "national-security consultant", a "social-justice activist", and a "pblic entrepreneur". He spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he advised the tribunal that was prosecuting war crimes. He had helped tart a progressive religious organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Internet advocacy groups, such as DarfurGenocide.org. He listened to the Dave Matthews Band and "conscious hip-hop" in his truck, a white Ford pickup. When he raised a glass of Jack Daniel's, it was to toast "a better world". He once wore a beard and briefly lived in New York, which had provided material for an ad by his opponent in 2008. He was told by political consultants not to mention his work in West Africa. His election victory was considered miraculous.
Perriello is an emblematic member of the Obama generation - a practical-minded idealist, skeptical of Washington but also eager to make government work on behalf of the hard-pressed farmer, the out of work seamstress, the small businessman. Obama was the first politician in Perriello's lifetime whho had inspired him. But as we drove along the highway he expressed frustration over the Administration's first year in office. Perriello bemoaned the Democrats' failure to explain the recovery act to the American People. "I've ever been part of any organization that was so bad at talking about its accomplishments," he said. He gave himself a decent chance of getting reelected, but at the moment he had a different concern: the Obama Administration was too cautious, and too close to Wall Street. He was thinking about writing an op-ed calling for the firing of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary. Perriello had won in 2008 by talking about "corporate capture of government", and by convincing voters that the Democrats would take on the big banks and corporations whose collusion with Washington had made it impossible for small entrepreneurs in the Fifth District to compete. Some of Obama's actions were undercutting Perriello's case.
As I drove, he checked his Blackberry and read an e-mail from a colleague. At that moment, a meeting was taking place ain the White House between the President and members of the Democratic caucus, and Obama had given a shout-out to Perriello - thanking him for his courageous votes, affirming their friendship, and promising to campaign for him int he Fifth District. For a moment, Perriello looked happy.
Blah blah blah... stimulus talk. Brief mention:A year ago, amid a mood of rising desperation, the public might well have embraced a large public-works program. Tom Perriello had been among the congressmen supporting it.
Infrastructure, etc...Over dinner on a recent snowy night in Washington, Tom Perriello said, "We should have gone in and done the kind of stimulus that would actually turn the economy around. We ended up with something that was strong enough to prevent a depression. But it just wasn't strong enough to stimulate the recovery." Perriello faulted teh administration not just for the size and composition of the stimulus package but for its lack of imagination. "It's very hard for people to understand, if all we see is the same thing we had last year, that without the stimulus we wouldn't even have held our ground," he said. "That's why we needed something more visionary. There was not a game-changer in the bill." As an example, Perriello mentioned the idea of building a national "smart grid" - a decentralized system of distributing power - whose creation would spur small-scal innovation acrsos the country. Such an ambitious project, Perriello argued, would have immediately signalled to investors where the money should flow. The Recovery Act allocated four billion dollars for smart-grid technology, but Perriello called the amount woefully inadequate. He compared teh days after OBama's Inauguration to the period following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the public was ready to be called on to think and act anew. "You could have done anything," Perriello said.
And on why another spending bill won't work: "The elites in the media and the Senate are already out of the depression," Perriello said.
On Obama-ian psychology:Tom Perriello, who admitted to sitting in "relatively cheap seats", remarked that the surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it's the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.
On bipartisanship:And, within weeks after Tom Perriello took office, freshman Republicans in the House had already stopped returning his phone calls, presumably on instructions from their leadership.
On why Republicans hate bipartisanship:Tom Perriello, typically, was even more blunt. He described conservative intransigence, in the face of critical national problems that were the legacy of Republican rule, as "unprecedented soullessness."
On #AIGFail:According to Perriello and other Democrats, a turning point came in March, 2009, when news broke that American International Group, int eh insurance giant that had received billions of dollars in bailout money, would pay its employees a hundred and sixty-five million dollars in bonuses.
...
As Perriello saw it, the Administration's failure to ttack AIG bonuses was more than a tactical error. It was a moment when Obama's economic policy was not actually based on responsibility. Ignoring the furor over the bonuses, Perriello said, revealed that Obama's economic team - especially Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who rums the National Economic Council - were far too close to the financial sector and had little empathy for middle-class Americans. "If you only know other people on Wall Street who make six or seven figures, all you're trying to do is get back to the nineties," Perriello said. "Well, in the nineties people in my district were losing a crapload of jobs." For Perriello, gong after Wall Street was not just a matter of conviction; it was the politics of survival, allowing him to draw a sharp line between the interests of the working people of his district and the interests of the Republicans they usually elected. But he wasn't getting help from the administration.
A few pages of talk about the Administration, a few pages about guys who make biofuel, then: He and his partners considered Perriello their champion. The Congressman gave them a bit of hope. Price said of Perriello, "Of all the people you meet in politics, he is the most down-to-earth, feel-like-he's-listening to kind of guy."
Perriello is currently pushing for a bill - he calls his version the Every Penny to Main Street Act - that would direct the money that banks have paid back from the bailout toward creating new jobs in time for the summer construction season. When I asked him if the idea would have the Administration's support, he said, "It's hard even now to understand what the White House's economic theory is." But Perriello hasn't given up on the President. He praised Obama's willingness to continue pushing for reforms in energy and health care, despite their current unpopularity. "We continue to see in this President and this Administration an unbelievable willingness to do what I got into politics to do, which is to take on the problems that neither part has had the guts to touch for my entire life," he said. "people will respect the courage to step up and solve these problems, as long as they see it as new policies - 'We are going to stand up to the special interests' - and not old politics: 'How are we going to carve out enough for every group?' The thing that gives me hope right now is that the President has got the message that this is a 'Let Obama be Obama' moment, that he should rise or fall on who he really is." Perriello added, "The downside is, I don't think we know yet who he really is."
The end. (Apologies for the typos that no doubt escaped me.)